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| "Coalbrookdale by Night," Philip James de Loutherberg, 1801 |
Ironically, that’s precisely what you’re doing when you paint the Industrial Revolution as a period of exploitation and misery. F.A. Hayek wrote in “Capitalism and the Historians” that “[t]here is…one supreme myth which more than any other has served to discredit the economic system to which we owe our present-day civilization….It is the legend of the deterioration of the position of the working classes in consequence of the rise of ‘capitalism.’”
Hayek gives four reasons that the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution did more to advance workers' well-being than any other economic arrangement had done before:
1) Since we can never expect a perfectly just economic system, we should be asking ourselves if the coming of industrialism worsened or improved the worker’s lot compared to what it had been before. Marxist theory doesn't do this - it looks at industrialism’s abuse of workers in historical isolation. Hayek remarks, “While there is every evidence that great misery existed [during the Industrial Revolution], there is none that it was greater than or even as great as it had been before.” The manorial system of tenant-farming had been no Wordsworth sonnet.
2) Attention was first drawn to the abuse of workers during the Industrial Revolution, not because abuse had been unknown before, but because “[t]he very increase of wealth and well-being which had been achieved raised standards and aspirations. What for ages had seemed a natural and inevitable situation…came to be regarded as incongruous with the opportunities which a new age had to offer.” Just as we might find a sin inexcusable in a saint while overlooking it in a sinner, poor working conditions and low-living standards became so glaring because of the hope of betterment the Industrial Revolution brought to the worker.
3) The “overpopulation” and crowding of cities is itself proof that standards of living were improving. “[W]hat in the past had been a recurring surplus of population doomed to early death was in an increasing measure given the possibility of survival. Numbers which had been practically stationary for many centuries began to increase rapidly. The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have ‘created’ was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it degraded to a lower level; it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided.”
4) Much of our information about the horrible conditions that workers had to put up with comes from the research of highly politicized, governmental commissions. “It was one of the main arguments with which the landowning class hit back at the manufacturers to counter the agitation of the latter against the Corn Laws and for free trade. And it was from these arguments of the conservative press that the radical intelligentsia of the time, with little firsthand knowledge of the industrial districts, derived their views which were to become the standard weapon of political propaganda.”
For instance, many of the early anti-industrial historians illustrated their arguments by referring to “Sadler’s Committee” of 1832. Here, several witnesses testified before members of parliament about working conditions in industrial sectors. There are just a few problems with using this as authoritative evidence. First, most of the abuses mentioned had happened over thirty years before, but were made to sound as if they were still in effect, though methods and conditions at factories had drastically changed. Second, very few of the witnesses were from industrial areas of the country. Third, the witnesses all refused to give their testimony under oath. Fourth, the opposition was not given a chance at rebuttal before the Committee’s evidence was published. Therefore, some of the Industrial Revolution's most lurid scenes, though published in newspapers, pamphlets and history books, was little more than baseless allegation.
